Shared Reading With Kids at Home
Shared reading at school is an engaging way to model and teach young readers about how books work. A teacher typically reads aloud a “big” book to the whole class, usually sitting on the carpet near the teacher. This gives the teacher the chance to model fluent reading and demonstrate how readers think about the books they read. Kids often chime in on parts of text that they know. Teachers will stop and ask questions, ask students to make predictions, and talk about vocabulary.
Why all parents should read with their kids
Parents who are supporting their kids through remote learning or homeschooling can definitely practice shared reading with their own children. If I magically could get every parent to do just one thing every single day, it would be to read to their kids.
In a study from the American Academy of Pediatrics, doctors found that preschool children listening to stories helped activate brain areas supporting mental imagery and narrative comprehension.
In 1985, The US Department of Education issued a landmark report called Becoming a Nation of Readers. The report found that “reading begins in the home” and that “the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”
Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook wrote about the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. The study found that “beginning kindergarten children who had been read to at least three times a week had a significantly greater phonemic awareness (phonics) than did children who were read to less often.” These children “were almost twice as likely to score in the top 25 percent in reading readiness.”
Shared Reading Process
When I sit down with a child to read a book, the first thing we do is look through the book to preview the text, sometimes known as a “picture walk.” Together with your child, discuss what the book is about. If your child has learned about genre, talk about whether the book is fiction or nonfiction and how they could tell.
When you ask your child questions, try to ask open questions. Open questions don’t have one word answers and require deeper thought. If you ask a child to tell how a character was feeling and they say “happy” follow up with, “How did you know?” This gives them practice in explaining their thinking. You can also model your thinking as you talk about the book. They need to understand that good readers really think about what they are reading.
As you are reading through the book, stop every now and then and ask your child what they think is going to happen next. You can also talk about the setting, the characters, and vocabulary words that come up. A child will have a deeper understanding if they see how the story connects to their own experiences. Ask, “Does this remind you of anything?”
When asking questions, it may take you child some time to come up with an answer. Always allow some wait time before you jump in and start talking again. This allows the child to process the question and reflect on an answer before they speak.
Resources
If you really want to dig deeper on shared reading with younger kids, I highly recommend The Ramped-Up Read Aloud: What to Notice as You Turn the Page by Maria Walther. It contains comprehension conversation questions for 101 different picture books that work especially well for kids in K-3. My personal copy is loaded with notes and highlighted questions.
The other must-have is The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease, 7th edition.
Please leave a comment if you have any questions or if I can help in any way.